A man’s porch is his castle

UNTIL last autumn, the city of Wilson was famous largely for tobacco and its savoury vinegar barbecue. Now it has become, in the words of Dan Carter, a professor of southern history at Emory University in Atlanta, a symbol of “the ultimate yuppiefication of the South”. Its crime is to have passed an ordinance banning a treasured southern practice: assigning to the porch a decrepit couch or recliner on which to doze in a cooling breeze or watch the world go by.

The Wilson city fathers think the battered old armchairs and sofas make the place look a mess, and prefer smart furniture made for the purpose. They are treading carefully. Rather than depend on city inspectors—the so-called “couch police”—they rely on residents to report offenders. Once a neighbour complains, violators are expected to get rid of offending furniture. If they refuse, the city will drag away the eyesores, and the offender is sent the bill for removing them.

Town officials say this has happened only twice so far. But it is hardly a recipe for harmony. Jerry Williams, a city councillor, opposed the law precisely because it depends on whether neighbours are friendly. But some who oppose the ordinance say that there are other, deeper, ramifications.

Nearly a fifth of Wilson's 40,000 residents are poor. Their homes, some of which are heated with coal, stand a few blocks from the baronial piles of Wilson's most prosperous citizens. Of the 15,000 houses, apartments and trailers, almost half are rented. Renters may have less interest in the upkeep of these properties, and may be more likely to drag on to the porch that wobbly lounger with splitting vinyl upholstery. Part of the thinking behind the ordinance, according to Jan Manning, the county environmental engineer, is that rickety furniture on the porch contributes to general decline. Improve the chairs, and you eventually improve the district.

However, as it happens, it is blacks, in the poorer central part of town, who tend to have the rickety furniture on their porches. Another southern tradition may therefore be in play: stern paternalism imposed by the mostly-white haves on the mostly-black have-nots.

Other Wilson residents—black and white, rich and poor—say the law has nothing to do with race and class. They point out that the furniture is often mouldy, falling apart and an ideal nest for rats and fleas. Vera Pope, whose impoverished Elvie Street district was a target of the new regulation, says the rule is concerned only with quality of life. She herself pushed for the law because “I was concerned about where we lived.”

John Campbell, chairman of the Wilson Appearance Commission, the nine-member biracial city panel that recommended the law, testily describes as “nonsense” the idea that the ordinance is aimed at minorities and the poor. This may be so. But the rule seems squarely aimed at the philosophy once enunciated by Eugene Walter, the late editor of the Paris Review, who grew up in Mobile, Alabama, that quintessential porch city. A southern porch, he wrote, is “a concept as well as a place”.